ComicBooks.com Register / Loginit's free!
HomeVanity Fair: Men of the DayMen of the Day: The Vanity Fair Caricatures › 'An Irish Lawyer' — Lord Morris of Spiddal
'An Irish Lawyer' — Lord Morris of Spiddal by Leslie Ward
Public domain · digitally restored by ComicBooks.com
Men of the Day: The Vanity Fair Caricatures

'An Irish Lawyer' — Lord Morris of Spiddal

Leslie Ward · Leslie Ward ('Spy'), chromolithograph, Vanity Fair, 14 September 1893

Spy renders Lord Morris — Lord Chief Justice of Ireland and later Baron Morris of Spiddal — in sharp profile: top hat, pince-nez on a cord, brown trousers straining at a prosperous belly, dark frock coat thrown back by a hand thrust behind him. The posture is genially self-satisfied, a prosperous Victorian lawyer caught mid-swagger. The caption 'An Irish Lawyer' does double work: identifying a professional type while signaling Irishness as its own editorial note, in an era when English illustrated weeklies routinely framed Irish public figures as curiosities or comic subjects. Ward's caricature here is relatively benign — no simianizing distortion of the kind common in Punch's Irish imagery — but the ethnic tag remains a quiet diminishment of a senior judicial officer into a regional specimen.

About this artifact

Creator
Leslie Ward
Date
Leslie Ward ('Spy'), chromolithograph, Vanity Fair, 14 September 1893
Rights
Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
Restoration
Digitally restored and hosted by ComicBooks.com.

Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.